WHAT SCIENCE AND SUPER-ACHIEVERS TEACH US ABOUT HUMAN POTENTIAL

The book

The author

David Shenk is the national bestselling author of five previous books, including The Forgetting ("remarkable" - Los Angeles Times), Data Smog ("indispensable" - New York Times), and The Immortal Game ("superb" - Wall Street Journal). He is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com, and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS.

May 28, 2009

IQTest.com claims that 5.42 million people have taken their online IQ test, which sends a small shudder through my spine.

"Previously
offered only to corporations, schools, and in certified professional
applications," they declare, "it is now available to you."
Later, they quietly acknowledge that their test is "not intended for
professional use [but rather] for personal entertainment purposes."

Far
be it from me to tell people how to entertain themselves; if anyone is taking
this test as an alternative to online porn or fart jokes, I guess I can't
complain.

But
presumably some of these 5.42 million people are taking the test to see how
smart they are, to know what their potential is. And at that point the
entertainment goes from comedy to tragedy. For starters, the IQtest.com is not
even a gross simplification of the Stanford-Binet Intelligene Scales. It tests
just a few logical thinking skills in the narrowest possible way.

More
importantly, even authentic IQ tests do not reveal any sort of innate
intelligence (as discussed in my IQ
FAQ). They cannot reveal your true potential. They only reveal the current
state of your academic skills, in comparison to others of the same age. That's
not an insignificant thing, but it is very far indeed from the portrayal of IQ
as a revelation of one's inner-smarts.

Some
people are actually plunking down cash to get the full report from IQTest.com.
That, to me is like a bad Jeff Foxworthy joke. You know your IQ ain't that
high if you're paying money for an online IQ test.

At
least porn is honest. These tests are furtively exploiting and perpetuating a
person's anxieties -- for cash. In fact, anyone taking online IQ test seriously
is getting caught up in the century-long but now-disproven "entity"
theory of intelligence. We now understand that intelligence is not a *thing*
one has a certain amount of, but a process of acquiring skills.

May 26, 2009

I
got a chance to see Springsteen the other night, in New Jersey no less, and it
was transcendent as always. As Nate Chinenwrotein the New York Times about the same show, "He
gave his usual force-of-nature performance."The
man is a whisper away from 60 years old and he still rocks the house like no
other human being. His shows are an hour shorter than in the old days, but the
intensity is still breathtaking. To my mind, it's more difficult to understand
his stage energy now than when he was in his 20s or 30s.

It's
also mind-bending how Bruce transforms a giant auditorium into a back patio. An
18,000-seat arena seems tiny when he's on stage. I think it's because you can
actually feel him connecting with every person in the room. It's a cathartic
experience, a celebration of the struggle and sadness of being alive. I used to
run away from the comparison of music to religion; but now I think they are
often the same thing.

I
could go on and on about Springsteen's virtues, but that would be boring.
You've heard it all before. It also wouldn't be completely honest, because the
truth is that I've come away from the last several tours feeling quite critical
of him too. Being in the presence of greatness can have that paradoxical effect: it can raise a person's standards and expectations to such a level
that small disappointments become a part of the experience. Some call it being
"picky," but really it's just holding certain things you
love to a higher standard. I wouldn't want to waste thirty seconds of my life
critiquing the production of a Barney episode. But the sublimity of Springsteen
invites a passionate and critical assessment. It's so close to perfection that
you can't help but notice what's missing.

What's
often missing these days, sadly, is the NOW. In this latest whirlaround with
the "legendary" E Street Band,[1]
Springsteen is waste deep in his fans' nostalgia. He spends an extraordinary
amount of energy trying to live up to the Legend of Bruce -- striking the
expected poses, playing the expected tunes, giving the audience not just the
spirit of what they came for, but the precise letter of it as well.

I'm
not saying the man doesn't care about his music. He does, deeply, and it
doesn't suffer in these performances.[2]
But in his and the band's preening, Springsteen is moving away from the raw and
powerful experience of a *Springsteen show* and replacing it with a pitch-perfect
template of The Bruce Springsteen Experience.

This
may be inevitable. Though still a vital musician -- he's as original as ever in
his recent records -- Springsteen recognizes that he has dug a very deep groove
in the American psyche. He's a known and revered quantity, and audiences badly want to hear those old songs; they want to see Springsteen leap on the piano.
They want Clarence to lean on Bruce's shoulder. They want Steve to share his
mic. It's harder to be Bruce Springsteen now than it was thirty years ago. All
he had to do then was worry about creating vital music. Now he has to worry
about being vital and meeting very specific demands.

I
was lucky enough to see Springsteen many times in his prime (from the mid-'70s
to the early '80s).[3] Those shows were all-consuming and exhausting. But they also
had an organic pace. They would explode out of the gate with two or three
roof-shaking numbers, and then we'd all catch our breath. The musicians would
tune. Bruce would tell a little story, or send one out to a local fan he'd met
the night before. Then another great song, and then another breath.

Today's
shows don't catch a breath. There's no space to talk, or drink, or tune. The
pace is relentless, as if taking a few moments here would someone deflate the experience. Even the song requests are incorporated
into the show without actually stopping the music -- Springsteen plucks a sign
from the audience, shows it to the band, and they storm into it.

This
relentlessness strikes me as ironic, because what Springsteen and the fans have
come together to relive was actually a very different sort of experience. Back
in the day, the band was well-prepped, but each show unrolled in the moment,
with plenty of real interaction between the band and the crowd. Bruce was
conversational, humble, and willing to let moments of reflection creep into his
head and onto the stage.

Taped
to the side of my desk is one of my favorite Springsteen remarks: "I
cannot promise you everlasting life, but I can promise you life RIGHT
NOW." That, to me, is the essence of what Springsteen has been able to
deliver all these years. The show I saw the other night was powerful, and
spiritual. But it was also staged to the nanosecond. No room for error, no room
for reflection, no room for the NOW.

It's easy to be a critic and hard to be an artist. I
know Springsteen would be criticized for whatever he does, or doesn't do. I
offer these thoughts more out of affection than anything else. Greatness is
terribly difficult to achieve, and perhaps even tougher to manage.[4]

[2] One
nostalgic decision does actually hurt the music: One the giant anthems (about
half the show), the band often now features an oppresive melange of five
guitars: Bruce, Steve, Nils, Patti, and Soozie. The music usually calls for
two, or a carefully arranged three.

May 19, 2009

Over the next few months, I want to pay individual tribute to some of the great scientists who are helping us to understand genetics, talent and intelligence in a whole new way.

In our Data Smog world of endless info and hyper-complexity, we all rely on trusted sources more than ever. It's a chain of trust: journalists rely on experts they trust most; citizens rely on journalists they trust most.

For the book I just finished, I'd estimate that I spent about 1/3 of my research time trying to identify trusted scientists. It's an exhaustive process. One doesn't want to simply latch on to those with a shared ideology. Rather, you carefully wade through a sea of scientific research, develop a sense of the different approaches, and slowly intuit which few minds seem to have the best handle on what's out there.

Something very funny happened to me about two years ago as I was developing my short list of favorites. One of my them turned out to be a neighbor.

Meet Professor Massimo Pigliucci.

His book bio said he was at the University of Tennessee, but by the time we got in touch, he happened to live a few hundred feet away from me in Brooklyn. This bit of luck ended up making my book stronger in a number of ways.

Massimo has for many years been a working (and teaching) biologist but has lately taken on the burdens of a public philosopher. He's helped me sort through the intricacies of gene expression and heritability, and helps others think through all sorts of other interesting matters in his blog "Rationally Speaking."

May 14, 2009

IQ is a battery of tests measuring basic academic skills and scored according to a pre-set curve.

What do IQ tests
measure?

IQ tests measure current academic abilities -- not any sort of fixed, innate
intelligence. More specifically, the best-known IQ battery,
"Stanford-Binet 5," measures Fluid Reasoning, Knowledge, Quantitative
Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Processing, and Working Memory -- skills known collectively as "symbolic logic." IQ tests do
not measure creativity;[i] they
do not measure "practical intelligence" (otherwise known as
"street smarts");[ii]
and they do not measure what some psychologists call "emotional
intelligence."

Harvard's Howard
Gardner:

"The tasks
featured in the IQ test are decidedly microscopic, are often unrelated to one
another, and . . . are remote, in many cases, from everyday life. They rely
heavily upon language and upon a person's skill in defining words, in knowing
facts about the world, in finding connections (and differences) among verbal
concepts . . . . Moreover, the intelligence test reveals little about an
indivdual's potential for further growth."[iii]

Tufts' Robert Sternberg:

IQ
problems tend to be "clearly defined, come with all the information needed
to solve them, have only a single right answer, which can be reached by only a
single method, [and are] disembodied from ordinary experience . . . . Practical
problems, in contrast, tend to
require problem recognition and formulation . . . require information seeking,
have various acceptable solutions, be embedded in and require prior everyday
experience, and require motivation and personal involvement."[iv]

How are IQ scores
determined?

Raw individual test
scores are converted so that they correlate perfectly to a bell curve
representing the entire population of same-age students. The average score is
always 100.

-
An IQ score of 100 means that 50% of the people in your age group scored
better, and 50% scored worse.

-
An IQ score of 85 means that 84.13% of the people in your age group scored
better, and 15.87% scored worse.

-
An IQ score of 130 means that 2.28% of the people in your age group scored
better, and 97.72% scored worse.

If IQ scores canchange over time, why do most people's IQ scores
stay reasonable stable?

What any individual can
achieve with the right combination
of assets and gumption is entirely different from what most people actually do
achieve. Most people settle into a particular academic standing early in life
and do not substantially deviate from that standing. That's the inertia of life
and human circumstance; the students performing at the top of the class in 4th
grade tend to be the same students performing at the top of the class in 12th
grade.[vi]
That's because the factors that enabled them to do well in fourth grade usually
stay in place throughout their school lives: same parents, same community, same
economic and cultural resources, etc.

Being branded with a
low IQ at a young age, in other words, is like being born poor. Due to personal
circumstances and the mechanisms of society, most people born poor will remain
poor throughout their lives. But that sure doesn't mean anyone is innately
poor or destined to be poor; there is always potential for any poor person to
become rich.

So IQ scores don't
imply any sort of fixed or innate intelligence?

Quite the contrary. We
know that the abilities IQ measures are skills, and we know that people can learn these skills. "Intelligence," Robert Sternberg has declared,
"represents a set of competencies in development." There is plenty of
evidence, for example, that schooling raises overall academic intelligence.[vii]
There is also evidence that most human beings are not reaching their cognitive
or academic potential.[viii]
Better schools and higher standards can raise the level of learning for nearly
all students.

Genes do have a substantial impact on many aspects of our physiology, including intelligence. But, sadly, very sloppy science and journalism have led us to believe that intelligence is essentially innate. It isn’t. Rather, intelligence is fluid, and is a function of many dynamic components. So while genes play a role in limiting our potential, every indication is that most of us don't come close to even grazing such limits, meaning that – from a practical perspective – gene-based limits do not hold us back.

Who invented IQ and
why have we all been taught that it reveals our innate intelligence?

It's a long story (which I
expand on in my book), but the short answer is that the modern IQ test was
invented by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, a prominent eugenicist, early
in the 20th century. Terman himself was absolutely convinced that IQ scores
revealed innate intelligence. "Psychological methods of measuring
intelligence [have] furnished conclusive proof that native differences in
endowment are a universal phenomenon," he wrote in 1925. But the whole concept of innate intelligence turns out to be a faulty one.

Terman also bizarrely assigned a protégé, Catherine Cox, to determine the IQs of long-dead
geniuses -- a laughable farce considering how IQ is normally measured and what
it is conventionally said to reveal. They assigned a score of 200 to Terman's
hero Francis Galton -- the father of innate intelligence.[ix]

- David Shenk

FOOTNOTES

[i]IQ scores do not identify the most successful
and creative artists or scientists:

[vi] From the 1995 APA report: "It is
important to understand [that] a child whose IQ score remains the same from age
6 to age 18 does not exhibit the same performance throughout that period. On
the contrary, steady gains in general knowledge vocabulary, reasoning ability,
etc. will be apparent. What does not change is his or her score in comparison
to that of other individuals of the same age."

May 12, 2009

We've just discussed
the importance of rivalry in great achievement. The compulsion to outdo -- or
just keep up with -- a sibling or friend or colleague can be a great
motivator.

I have two
brothers. In the last few months, one, Jon Shenk, has been honored at the Academy
Awards; the other, Joshua Wolf Shenk, is hailed as "brilliant" in
David Brooks's New York Times
column this morning. Brooks praises Josh's great new piece in The Atlantic, called "What Makes Us Happy?" But did
Josh ever stop and consider whether all his success is making me happy? You raise a little brother to
do good in the world, and this is the thanks you get...

(One of my
first emails this morning read came from my friend Erez, who wrote:
"ooh, the sibling rivalry must be scorching!!!" And he ought to
know, because his younger brother is also quite the overachiever.)

Gore Vidal
once said, "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me
dies." It may be the best expression of envy ever, and anyone with a grain
of ambition recognizes that gnawing feeling of watching a peer succeed in a way
that you desperately wish was your own. But that's just the annoying pull of
the dark side; there's also an incredibly uplifting force of good at work here,
reminding us that success is not a zero sum game, and that, in fact, watching
peers succeed is an enormous gift on several levels:

• You
get a boost of rivalrous motivation; if you had to pick just one thing,
motivation is the difference between good work and great work. • You
get to see first-hand how mediocre work becomes transformed into extraordinary
work. You witness the dogged persistence, the slow improvement, the eagerness to
fail and learn from mistakes.[i]
You understand intuitively that your friend or relative doesn't have any innate
advantage; they've just applied themselves well and refused to give up. • Success
begets success. Having Jon and Josh's great work recognized over the years has
earned them relationships with other smart and successful people, many of which
I've benefited from. (It has also flowed in the other direction, I hope).

Are there some successful peers who I'm not happy for? Yes, but I'm working on that....

[i] On the subject of greatness comingfrom nothingness, a fertile quote from Brian Eno basically sums up much of the thesis of my book:

"What would be really interesting for people to
see is how beautiful things grow out of shit . . . .
Nobody ever believes [that it happens that way]. Everybody thinks
that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head, that it somehow
appeared there and formed in his head, and all he had to do was write them down
. . . What would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is
that . . . things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing.
The tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest,
and then, the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. .
. .

"I think this would be important for
people to understand because it gives people confidence in their own lives to
know that that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there
are some people who are so gifted, that they have these wonderful
things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of . . . a
'normal' person. [But with this insight], you could have another kind
of life. You could say, 'Well, I know that things come from nothing very much
and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising
beginning -- I could start something.'"

May 11, 2009

Yet another wonderful science piece this past weekend on NPR's Radiolab, hosted by the very inventive Jad Abumrad and the great Robert Krulwich. During the time I was researching and writing my book, I would quite often turn on the radio and hear these guys nibbling on the same piece of research or a similar idea. And it's always fun to hear how they make complex science accessible to the common ear. This particular piece is on the surprising genetic realities of racial difference, which is also something I tackle in my upcoming book.

Krulwich is a broadcast legend whose name I used to hear whispered in hushed tones when I was a young producer working for NPR. Early on, I think he was mostly known as an economics correspondent. But over the years his purview seems to have become Big, Difficult Ideas. Unpacking complex ideas has always been an important part of journalism, but I would argue it is more important than ever now. It's easy now for the public to track events and get raw facts -- but harder than ever to put them into a meaningful context. As a print guy, I have admit that radio may be the best medium of all to make this happen. (I wrote an essay on this years ago for Technology Review.) Another great example of radio's fertile idea landscape is the recent award-winning series on the economic meltdown by Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. (Blumberg's family is friendly with mine from Cincinnati, and it's been a treat to watch him develop into a first-class storyteller and journalist.)

May 04, 2009

To anyone unaware of the photographer Richard L. Shenk (my dad), this picture is perfectly mundane. A man holding a camera.

To his family and friends, it is a miraculous and triumphant event. Fifty-five weeks ago, Dad was in a catastrophic plane crash. His injuries were horrific, and he was not expected to live. He struggled in the hospital for more than a year.

Last week he came home. His life will never be as it was, but we're all hoping he can find his old creative spark. Today, we drove to his office/darkroom in Basalt, Colorado, cranked up some Springsteen ('75), and dusted off one of his Hasselblads for a short photo session. An artist returning to his art.

We also spent a few hours looking over his photographs for his upcoming photographic show in Aspen. Yes, he's my Dad, so I'm partial as hell. But to me, his work has all the elements of great art: it is visually arresting, emotionally provocative, and forces the viewer to see and be curious about the world in a new way.

Just a few favorites:

I'm also partial to my Dad's work because he taught me how to be creative, how to think differently, how to pursue a vision, how to relentlessly hone your craft.